Sunday, January 24, 2010

CHARLOTTE-BEYOND HER LEGACY

IT doesn’t take long for “IRM,” the new album by the French singer and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, to start sounding Gainsbourgian. The record opens with “Master’s Hands,” a ballad full of tense guitar and banjo picking, clattering percussion and strings that dart and swoop.

It is Ms. Gainsbourg’s signature vocal maneuver. It is also her birthright. That dreamy whisper-singing — a style that gives every lyric the feeling of a slightly scandalous confession — was pioneered by her father, the Gallic pop great and provocateur Serge Gainsbourg, and perfected in his famous collaborations with Ms. Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin, the English actress and vocalist.

It can be hard to get past the pedigree when considering Ms. Gainsbourg. She has had a long and successful career as a film actress, starring in dozens of movies, including Michel Gondry’s “Science of Sleep” and Lars von Trier’s controversial “Antichrist,” for which she won the best actress award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. (Ms. Gainsbourg’s husband is the actor and director Yvan Attal.)

But as a singer, the legacy of her father looms large. Like Julian Lennon, like Ziggy Marley, like Jakob Dylan, she is blessed and burdened with a name that not only defines an illustrious musical era but seems to sum up a national sensibility. Her father’s witty, smutty, sonically inventive recordings are the most celebrated French pop of the second half of the 20th century. Hits like the heavy-breathing Gainsbourg-Birkin duet “Je T’aime ... Moi Non Plus,” from 1969, capture France’s sexiness and urbanity as surely as Bob Marley’s songs speak to the Jamaican soul and Bob Dylan’s distill American roots music tradition.

From the beginning the musical career of Gainsbourg fille has been entwined with that of Gainsbourg père, who died in 1991. Ms. Gainsbourg made her recording debut in 1985 at 13, a duet with her father on one of his juiciest succès de scandales, “Lemon Incest.” On Ms. Gainsbourg’s 2006 CD “5:55,” her first album after a 20-year musical hiatus, she sounded weighed down by her patrimony, singing in a voice delicate to the point of self-effacing amid orchestral pop arrangements that explicitly echoed her father’s records.

“Just because my father was such a genius with his songwriting, his lyrics, his music — that doesn’t mean I have any gift,” Ms. Gainsbourg, 38, said in a telephone interview from her home in Paris. “I don’t believe in that. I have my own path. But the comparisons are constant. And the comparisons are heavy to wear.”

In an e-mail message Ms. Birkin asserted that her daughter has already found her own identity. “I think she has established, in two very big-selling records, that ‘she is she,’ not Serge, not me. But, sweetly she has our voices in her head.”

Yet on “IRM,” which was produced and largely written by Beck, Ms. Gainsbourg’s anxiety of influence seems to have dissipated. She still sings in that patented Gainsbourgian hiss on “Master’s Hands” and several other tracks. But she branches out elsewhere, ambling through folk-rock ballads, venturing into dance-punk and blues, and letting Beck swamp her voice in layers of distortion. The result is an engrossingly eclectic pop record and a kind of coming-out party: the first time that Ms. Gainsbourg the chanteuse has displayed the charisma of Charlotte Gainsbourg the actress.

“Ideally music is more instinctive than acting,” said Ms. Gainsbourg, who speaks softly and precisely with a slight British accent. “On this album I tried to let my instincts guide me and tried not be so guarded — tried to let accidents happen.”

It was a less happy kind of accident that spurred “IRM” in the first place. Vacationing in the United States in the summer of 2007, Ms. Gainsbourg had a minor fall while water-skiing. Six months later she went to the doctor in Paris, complaining of chronic headaches. An MRI scan revealed that she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was lucky to be alive.

Ms. Gainsbourg underwent successful emergency surgery but remained convinced that she was unwell, continuing to schedule MRI examinations for months after getting a clean bill of health. “I was so preoccupied with my condition, always thinking that I had something,” she recalled.

When she turned her attention to a new record in early 2008, she had two goals in mind: to sing about her medical crisis and to work with Beck, whom she had met some years earlier. “I’d admired him so much,” she said. That spring, she traveled to Beck’s home studio in Los Angeles, where the pair began working through a few songs. One of the first results was “Master’s Hands.” Written entirely by Beck, it included lyrics that eerily evoked Ms. Gainsbourg’s medical experiences: “Drill my brain/All full of holes/And patch it before it leaks.” Yet Beck had said he was unaware of Ms. Gainsbourg’s brain hemorrhage until after the song had been composed. (His sound engineer pointed out the coincidence.) For Ms. Gainsbourg it was a sign that this was a good musical match.

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